Many people who are constantly working behind a desk struggle to find the time to work out, socialise, have a great home life, and also get enough hours of sleep. Unfortunately for them, fitness is intricately linked to sleep. Those who struggle to meet their fitness goals despite exercising regularly may just find that it’s a lack of sleep that’s causing this.
What’s the best solution? Get out from behind that desk and into the gym more often with a career in personal training. You will learn new skills, be more active, have more hours in the day for exercise, and smash your sleep goals!
Why Is Sleep Important for Exercise?
It’s obvious that the type of workouts and consistency is crucial to your overall fitness. However, it’s far less commonly understood where sleep fits into the picture of exercise.
Sleep is the body’s ultimate recovery time. It allows us to rest, repair, and regenerate. When we get a decent amount of quality sleep at night, our body starts producing human growth hormone. This is exactly what we need to build up our muscles and our strength. It is essential for recovery from hard-core workouts, or any workout!
One study found that participants who didn’t get a good night’s sleep before a workout felt exhausted more quickly and felt that it was more effort to complete the workout than if they had an awesome night’s rest.
It’s well documented that a lot of physical activity is about mind over matter. In the same study, participants found that their mind was telling their body it was ready to give up much sooner than it otherwise would have.
What Happens if We Don’t Sleep?
While we’re fast asleep, our bodies are hard at work making sure that we are healthy. They start producing hormones released into our system that help us to process glucose from carbohydrates as well as hormones which control our metabolism and appetites. So, you can see that without enough sleep we may start eating too much as well as not processing this food intake efficiently, which can result in weight gain.
Additionally, when you don’t get enough sleep, the body starts producing more cortisol, colloquially called the stress hormone. It gets released from the adrenal glands above the kidney directly into the bloodstream. When your body constantly produces an overabundance of cortisol, this has been linked to the risk of developing type 2 diabetes and the factors that lead heart disease. Another side effect of not sleeping enough is that less insulin gets released after eating and along with increased cortisol and an oversupply of glucose in the blood, this is a dangerous problem.
How Does Exercise Affect Sleep?
Now, the link between sleep and exercise goes both ways. Many experts recommend that if you just can’t seem to get to sleep at night, their top tip is to exercise!
One study uncovered some interesting findings regarding how sleep and fitness are related. It took people who slept less than 6.5 hours each night and got them to exercise for 6 weeks, 4 days a week, at a moderate intensity. After this period, the participants on average slept for 75 minutes extra each night! This incredible number shows that if you are struggling to sleep, exercise really works to fix this.
Become A Personal Trainer
Do you find it hard at times to fit sleep, fitness, and work into your schedule? One of the best tips we can give you is to remove one of these by combining your job with your love of fitness! Become a personal trainer and you’ll be in and out of a gym all day long, leaving you plenty of time for sleep at the end of the day.
If you’re passionate about exercise, then helping others to meet their fitness and rehabilitation goals is one of the most rewarding careers there is.
Even better, when you study personal training through the College of Health and Fitness, you can do this to fit in around your schedule. Take your classes in person or online at your own pace, so you can fit it in around your lifestyle. This means there should be no need to stay up all night doing assignments, ruining your sleep patterns and therefore your workout the next day!
To become a personal trainer, you must first study Certificate III in Fitness. This enables you to start working in a fitness facility and get an idea of what it is like to work in the health and fitness industry. It’s the first step on the road to becoming a personal trainer. Across the course of this study, you will learn all about:
- Conducting fitness appraisals
- Working in a fitness or sport environment
- Workplace communication
- Risk management
- Health screening
- Physiology and anatomy principles and how they affect fitness
- Instructing fitness programmes
If you’re interested in changing your life and getting out of the office environment away from all of those screens, fluorescent lights, and stress that keep you awake at night, consider studying Certificate 3 in Fitness. Contact us today to learn more and enrol.